The other day I read an article oh India, in one of our popular magazines, in which the writer gave the British Indian Government much severe advice, asking why they did not abolish caste, why they did not introduce democracy, and so forth, and summing up the whole venture as a huge failure. The writer headed his article with “Fighting for the Common Cause,” or some such phrase; and as I read, a former occasion on which I had heard the same words came back suddenly into my mind.

It was at the junction of the Nalhati State railway, amid the illimitable rice fields of Lower Bengal, where I was waiting, far on in the night, for a train that was to take me to my first post. The engine driver had some doubt as to his skill, so he spent an hour or two practicing, running his little train back and forward a hundred yards or so, and whistling shrilly till the jackals barked back at him. I was in the only first-class compartment, some six feet square, and as I dozed uneasily, I was conscious of high-pitched voices in the next compartment, talking the Bengali tongue, which I had studied industriously at home for the last two years. Finally, with magnificent rhetoric, one of the speakers cried “Amra fighting-for-the-common-cause hoilam!” And all the others applauded vehemently. They were on their way home from the Indian National Congress.